Two weeks ago I would never have believed that I would be writing this, but I have tremendously enjoyed the 2008 Summer Olympics from Beijing.   You have to understand. ..it’s not that I normally dislike the Olympics.   I normally hate the Olympics.  I revile them, I detest them, I abhor them.   They turn my stomach.   Without any exaggeration, I could give you a list of 600 reasons to despise the Olympic “movement” and everything about it.   I’m sure a few of these reasons will turn up here, but that’s not what I’m writing about.

            Before these Olympics started, since I have this Online, I debated whether I should explain how I feel about the Olympics at or near the start of the games.   I decided not.   My partner, John Dewan, loves the Olympics, and my wife loves the Olympics.   Setting that aside, writing about how much I hate the Olympics when other people are trying to enjoy them basically amounts to pissing on their shoes while they’re trying to watch television.

            But these Olympics were very different.  All of the things that I have hated about the Olympics for 36 years had just vanished.   Not all of them, I guess, but. . .you know, there are things about baseball I don’t like.   One lives comfortably with a certain number of complaints.

            The Olympics have been, for many years, the repository and expression of all that is Wrong with sports, a carnival of arrogance, self-righteousness, pretentiousness and pettiness.   And viciousness.  And divisiveness.  And greed.   What in the world happened to make these games so much fun?

            I have been pondering this, in my anal-retentive, by-the-numbers way, and I have come up with a list of contributing factors.   It starts with three passages:

            1)  The end of the Cold War. 

            One of the things that made the Olympics so painful to watch for many years was the politicized judging that was created by the Cold War and lingered after it.  

            I have a problem, to begin with, with any “sport” that relies on impressing judges to gain victory.   I believe that setting the objective of a sport as impressing judges is stupid, unnecessary, and antithetical to sport.   I think frankly that any sport that does that is a poorly designed sport.   Gymnastics, in particular, could very easily be re-designed so that the gymnast had to do something, in competition with another gymnast, in order to secure victory.

            One designs a sport so that the judges are central to it if one wishes to increase the power, prestige and influence of the people who appoint the judges.   That problem is still there, although it seems to me that it may be getting better.  But the problem of poorly designed sports was greatly exacerbated, for 50 years, by Soviet bloc politics. 

There is (and has long been) a rule that no country judges its own competitors.

But during the Cold War, Iron Curtain countries displayed naked bias against American competitors, and we were all expected to smile and pretend it wasn’t happening.   An American diver could jump off the platform, pirouette, stick his neck between his ankles, do six back flips, French kiss a movie star and change his swimsuit before he hit the water, and he was going to get a 6.5 from the Hungarian judge.  A Soviet diver could fall off the platform and break his scapula and get 9s from the entire Eastern bloc contingent.   Political commentators actually used to try to infer the political leanings of a new government from their Olympic scoring.   “Pretty high scores for the Soviet athletes from the Venezuelans, didn’t you think, Jim?  Do you think maybe we’ve got a problem down there?”

            An American boxer could beat the marbles out of his opponent, and you just never knew who would get the decision; it depended on where the judges were from and how long it had been since the KGB had come to their room.  Everybody knew, and anybody could see, that the scoring was a cesspool of bias and corruption—and yet somehow we were supposed to pretend that this was a wonderful international celebration of our common humanity.  It was nauseating.  

            Over the twenty years since the Berlin wall came down, we’ve seen a gradual reduction of that.   It is still a lousy idea to have sports set up so that the whole thing is based on kissing up to the judges, but it seemed to me, in this Olympics, to be vastly better than it was twelve or sixteen years ago. 

2.      The Ousting of Juan Antonio Samaranch

Samaranch, for those of you who weren’t paying attention for a half-century or so, is a Spanish con artist who somehow weaseled his way into a position as the permanent head of the International Olympic Committee.   He insisted on being addressed as “Your Excellency”, went everywhere in private jets and chauffeured limousines, and stayed only in Presidential suites.   His private suite in Lausanne, Switzerland was rented for him, with Olympic funds, for $500,000 a year.  It was a drop in the bucket to the full cost of sustaining Samaranch in the opulence to which he was accustomed.

Samaranch staffed every Olympic committee with cronies, relatives, toadies and sycophants who engaged in obvious and more or less open bribery and corruption.   Discovering that many cities wanted desperately to host the Olympic games, Samaranch’s lackey’s competed to see who could extort the most money from potential host cities in exchange for their votes.   Everything was for sale in Samaranch’s fiefdom—judging positions, press credentials, administrative staff accommodations.

The athletes, meanwhile, were supposed to be amateurs!   While stuffing his own pockets with the sales of everything material and symbolic, Samaranch stubbornly insisted that the athletes needed to be pure amateurs uncorrupted by lucre, or even endorsements.   It seems fantastic, in retrospect, that the world put up with this as long as it did.  Jim McKay would wax poetic about this wonderful theater of pure sportsmanship, and somehow we were not supposed to notice that the whole show was being orchestrated by Lex Luthor.  Maybe it was just me, but I couldn’t help noticing.

Samaranch was forced out by pressure from the athletes in 2001, although he remains as honorary President for Life of the Olympic organizing committee.  By no means have all of his minions been purged from the Olympic bureaucracy, and by no means have all of the problems he symbolized been solved.  Samaranch’s son, Lex Luthor Jr., is still on the Olympic Organizing Committee.  But the corruption is not as flagrant as it was for many years.

3.      The Retirement and Death of Jim McKay

I can pinpoint exactly the moment at which I began to loath the Olympics.   It was the Montreal Olympics in 1976, and yes, there were troubling aspects to the 1968 Olympics, and yes, the 1972 Munich Olympics were horrific, and yes, I still have regularly scheduled brain aneurisms at the mention the 1972 Olympic Gold Medal basketball game, when the closing seconds were re-played repeatedly until the Russians finally won.  Those things were awful, but my perception at the time was that they were diminishing what was supposed to be a glorious celebration.

So then there was Jim McKay, hosting the 1976 Olympics from Montreal in a powder-blue sports jacket, and LeRoy Nieman, a pretentious jackass who used to do some illustrations for Sports Illustrated, was painting a big picture in the studio, live during the broadcast.   “It is,” intoned McKay very seriously, “the first time that a great work of art has ever been created on live television.”  

Think about it. 

            Jim McKay was the broadcast anchor for ABC’s coverage of the Olympic games for many years.  His Wikipedia entry says that he covered twelve Olympics, but that must count Winter and Summer games separately, and he may not have hosted all of those.  I think the concept of a “studio host” for the broadcast evolved gradually over those years, and McKay was the first person to take the center seat.

            No Olympic cycle was complete without long, effusive tributes to McKay’s brilliance as a television journalist, centered on his grave and sensitive handling of the Munich massacre.   The reality is, McKay was God-awful.   Having to listen to endless sermonettes about how great he was made it worse.

            If brown-nosing network executives had been an Olympic sport, Jim McKay would have had more medals than East Germany.   The network loved him because he could find some way to work congratulations to the network for their spectacular coverage of the event into almost every sentence.   Everything the network did was some sort of insipid breakthrough.   The camera angles were new, or the slow-motion equipment, or the graphics, or the telephoto lenses, or the reporter’s underarm de-odorant. 

            McKay was pathetic, but for some reason the “journalists” were convinced he was marvelous.   I don’t celebrate his death, but. . . .as an old person myself, one comes to understand that the Lord uses the passing of generations to wash the world of its ills.   Juan Antonio Samaranch will die soon, praise the Lord, and the evils that he embodies will be imperfectly passed on to his successors.   The passing of a generation gives us a chance to do better.  

            I am not saying that Bob Costas was good in this role, although I think honestly that Costas was great.   But it was the games that were great, man; it was the games.   Jim McKay’s unctuous omnipresent ramblings interfered with the games.   You’re trying to watch downhill skiing, and Jim McKay sticks his bright and smiling face in front of the camera to tell you what a wonderful, wonderful job they’re doing of covering this event for you, we’ll be back after the commercial.   Go away, Jim.  

            These flaws interacted to create more abscesses on the games than one can count.  The Olympics were rife with stupid sports that had no fan base anywhere in the world, added to the Olympic schedule by some committee of Samaranch’s henchmen because somebody was bought off to OK them.   Jim McKay gushed and talked earnestly about the huge popularity in Lithuania of racing with beagles on roller skates or whatever the hell it was.   McKay’s relentless self-righteousness provided simultaneous cover for Samaranch’s flimflams and Soviet bloc cheating.   I didn’t mention that specifically, did I:  open, obvious, upfront cheating; pay no attention to that woman behind the moustache.   The East German women were obviously consuming more steroids than strudel, and co-incidentally the East German weight lifters were throwing around filing cabinets like they were doorknobs, and we’re not supposed to notice because Jim McKay is telling us constantly what a wonderful, wonderful, marvelous spectacle we are privileged to witness here.   The Americans are supposed to be amateurs, but Juan Antonio Samaranch, while scrubbing the lives of American athletes to make sure nobody was making $10 endorsing a lemonade stand, looks the other way while the Russians subsidize every moment of their athletes’ lives.   32-year-old Czechoslovakian volleyball players who have trained together for decades are matched against 19-year-old Americans who were introduced three weeks ago, but we’re not supposed to notice.   There’s no investigation into things that are obviously crooked.   Nobody believes that the East German women aren’t cheating—but nobody does anything, either.   Nobody believes that the Romanian weight-lifters are amateurs—but nobody does anything about it.   This goes on for decades.  

            OK, the Chinese this year were cheating on the birth certificates, but this wasn’t entirely overlooked; there seemed to be a realistic hope that something would eventually be done about it.   Setting that aside, one country cheating in two or three events is not on the same level as the corruption that plagued the games for so many years.  No American sprinters were told that their heats started at 2:30 when it was actually ten in the morning.   No American boxers were disqualified for having the wrong kind of tape on their gloves. 

And it is not that I want the Americans to win everything; I could care less whether the Americans win.   What bothers me is to see America treated unfairly. 

So far I have been talking not about the things that made this Olympics good, but about a few of the things that used to make the Olympics so awful.   On the positive side, I loved Usain Bolt.  You can complain about Show Bolting all you want, but compared to Carl Lewis, Usain Bolt is pure fun.   Lewis—like Mark Spitz and many before him, dating back to Sonja Henie--tried to package himself as a cultural icon, based on his performance at the Olympics.   He was trying to be the Cal Ripken of track and field, so to speak, but he came off more in the Steve Garvey mode.  Phony.  Plastic.  Over-eager.  He was on my list of 600 things I hated about the Olympics.   Bolt?   Bolt’s just a goofy kid who can run faster than anybody else, ever.  He’s fun. 

            This Olympics worked, in part, because the Chinese did a marvelous job of staging the games.   The Birds Nest and the Water Cube were impressive facilities, architecturally interesting but functionally sound.  The schedule seemed to work, the security worked, the ticketing worked, the transportation worked—or at least when it didn’t, we didn’t hear much about it.  

            Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Shawn Johnson, the Birds Nest and the Water Cube. . .those were all great.   But I really think that what it was, more than anything else, was that NBC finally figured out how to broadcast a track meet.  

            The reality is that, for most of us, the Olympics are a television show.   I’m not saying this to diminish the Olympics; I understand that they are much more than that to the people who participate and those who attend.  Most of us don’t.   For most of us, it’s a TV show.  

            In 2002 my family visited London during the Commonwealth Games, which are a sort of British mini-Olympics, held every four years since 1930.   We were astonished to discover that we loved watching them—not that one goes to Europe to watch television, but, after a long and tiring day of driving on the wrong side of the road and trying to decipher road signs like “Warning:  Adverse Camber”, we’d collapse on the couch and see what was on the telly.  

            The Commonwealth Games were exciting and fun, in large part, because the BBC didn’t have enough money to over-produce them.  The coverage moved quickly from sport to sport to sport, and yes, there were interviews with a few of the winners and a few of the losers, and yes, there were a handful of features about the athletes, but mostly, it was about the games. 

            That was what NBC, it seemed to me, finally got:  It is about the games.  The phrase “Up Close and Personal” has been relegated to the tinseltrashbin of history, may Ebersol be praised.  

            I never had a problem with the concept of Up Close and Personal features, in general.  Individually, I enjoyed many of them or most of them.   The problem was, NBC had no idea when to stop.   It’s like the icing on a cake:  Who doesn’t like icing?  You don’t eat cake that is 30% cake and 70% icing.   You don’t eat little pieces of potatoes, floating in gravy.  

            For many years NBC

a)      was doing way, way too many profiles of the athletes,

b)      was doing the same kind of profiles over and over, and

c)      was actually promoting the profiles, rather than the athletic competitions.

Doing profiles of the athletes is one thing.   Bragging about them is another.   NBC still offered a certain number of features on athletes, on life in China and the difficulties of representing Eritrea is any competition other than organized team starvation.    That’s fine, but it is supposed to add depth to the competition; it’s not supposed to be the central focus.

My friend Mike Webber remembers one footrace in Atlanta, an eight-woman contest in which all eight women were running to overcome some sort of heart-rending personal tragedy.   That was another problem in the coverage:  NBC’s coverage of the Olympics, for many years, was obviously slanted toward women viewers.   There was one year. . .this is from memory and probably wrong. . .there was one year when NBC offered twenty-some hours of coverage of women’s gymnastics, and not one second of boxing.   This may not be true, but I believed it because it conformed to my image of the production.  

I don’t think that women’s sports are any less interesting than men’s sports, inherently, and I don’t think a female audience is any less worthy than a male audience.   I think it is patronizing the audience, male or female, when you decide that, in order to make this appealing to women, you have to convert a footrace into a soap opera.  

One thing that helped NBC this year is the proliferation of cable channels, which gave NBC the opportunity

a)      to show multiple events at the same time,

b)      to continue with other programming while carrying forward the Olympic flame, and

c)      to provide coverage of events that have limited wide-audience potential. 

             That helped NBC to do its job better—but it wasn’t that that made it work.   It was NBC getting smarter.  Do you remember how NBC, in a tradition dating back to the days of Jim McKay’s on-air flossing and waxing poetic, would say “This event occurred some sixteen hours ago.   We’re going to flash the scores on the screen now, but we won’t say them aloud, and if you don’t want to know who won, look away from the screen.”   This was self-conscious and unnecessary.  

            One thing that NBC did brilliantly this year was to seamlessly mix taped with live events, with minimal viewer awareness of the schedule.   They didn’t lie to you; they didn’t try to make you think that something was live when it was taped—but they didn’t apologetically distinguish at every opportunity between what was taped and what was live, either.   What difference does it make?   Who does this help?   You can go on the internet and look up scores if you want to.  Many times NBC would show something live in the middle of the night on some offbrand cable network, and then show taped, edited versions of the same in prime time.   The end result:  more sports, less chatter.   That was wonderful.

            Cris Collinsworth, I thought, was very, very good.   Mary Carillo, the lady who did the features on life in China, was outstanding.   That was another problem with having everybody and her sister doing Up Close and Personal features:  many of the people who were creating these things didn’t have any real idea what they were doing, they were just opening up a can and pouring in some footage.  Less time was spent in the studio, I thought, and because of that less time was spent flogging controversies and hyping superstars that two weeks ago you never heard of and three weeks from now you’ll have no interest in. 

            Bela Karolyi was not good.   Despite his background he didn’t really have anything to say, but the studio producers would occasionally decide that he was funny and charming, and would give him five minutes to make an ass of himself ranting unintelligibly in pigeon English.   Apparently it was more fun if you were actually in the studio.  

            Many of the burdens of Olympics past still weigh us down today—Hitler in Berlin, the Blood-in-the-Water water polo game in ’56, the raised fists in Mexico in ’68, the murders in Munich, the boycott in 1980 and the boycott in ’84, the bombing at Atlanta in ’96.   Every four years we would be told that this was a celebration of our shared values, when in reality it was politics at its ugliest, its most vicious, its most pernicious.   I won’t live long enough to forget all of this stuff, but as it moves into the past it can become less significant.

            The overwhelming arrogance of the Olympic “movement” is still written large on every medal.  What other sporting event, after all, is allowed to refer to itself as a “movement”?   What would we say of basketball players who insisted that they needed a “basketball village”?   To bring the Olympics to your city, you are expected to build brand-new, never-occupied apartments to house the athletes.   Nobody is supposed to notice the fantastic arrogance that this implies.  Olympic athletes are too good to stay in hotel rooms that have been occupied by mere mortals?   Olympic stadium in Montreal is a perfect symbol for the Olympic “movement”:  flashy, bloated, awe-inspiring and ultimately useless.  And ugly.

            The Olympic “movement” has had many dark moments, and I am afraid I will not live long enough to forget them all.   But this was a good moment.   This was the best set of games, I think, in my lifetime—or if not the best set of games, at least the best television show made from them.    My hat is off to China, and to NBC.   The Olympics of the past are one thing; let us hope that the Olympics of the future are more like this.